Tor Bridge in Russian VPS provider

Support Censorship Circumvention
1

Hello, i rented a VPS in russia and want to run tor bridge relay to support TOR users. However it can not connect and stucks at 5% or 14%. Below bridge relay config and errors. Same config works on different VPS provider in Russia without getting stuck. On not working VPS, as test, i run tor client over bridge relay with obfs4, hosted by others, it can connect and route traffic through them. Hosting a bridge relay however, can not establish connection over obfs4. Any workaround here maybe?

Firewall on VPS is off, obsf4 binary path is correct, ubuntu 24, tor 0.4.8.10, bandwith 100Mbit up+download.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>> torrc config

RunAsDaemon 1
BridgeRelay 1
PublishServerDescriptor bridge
ORPort 23491 IPv4Only
ServerTransportPlugin obfs4 exec /usr/bin/obfs4proxy
ServerTransportListenAddr obfs4 0.0.0.0:8443
ExtORPort auto
Nickname XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
BridgeDistribution moat
ExitPolicy reject :

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ERROR

Aug 12 20:31:24 Tor[28548]: Problem bootstrapping. Stuck at 14% (handshake): Handshaking with a relay. (Connection timed out; TIMEOUT; count 94; recommendation warn; host BEF80BE4A95AFE2504EAEE58FE7067C50D148A65 at 60.234.200.12:9001)
Aug 12 20:31:24 Tor[28548]: 93 connections have failed:
Aug 12 20:31:24 Tor[28548]: 92 connections died in state connect()ing with SSL state (No SSL object)
Aug 12 20:31:24 Tor[28548]: 1 connections died in state handshaking (Tor, v3 handshake) with SSL state SSL negotiation finished successfully in CLOSED

<<<<<<<<from nyx

page 2 / 5 - m: menu, p: pause, h: page help, q: quit
Connections (6 circuit):
XXXXXXXXXXXX → Building… Purpose: General, Circuit ID: 1 1.4m (CIRCUIT)
XXXXXXXXXXXX → Building… Purpose: General, Circuit ID: 2 1.4m (CIRCUIT)
XXXXXXXXXXXX → Building… Purpose: General, Circuit ID: 3 1.3m (CIRCUIT)
XXXXXXXXXXXX → Building… Purpose: General, Circuit ID: 4 1.3m (CIRCUIT)
XXXXXXXXXXXX → Building… Purpose: General, Circuit ID: 5 1.3m (CIRCUIT)
XXXXXXXXXXXX → Building… Purpose: General, Circuit ID: 6 1.3m (CIRCUIT)

2

I’m pretty sure since Tor is blocked in Russia you can’t run any relays or bridges, since they can’t connect to the Tor Network.

3

This can’t work. DPI systems in Russia block ALL public Tor IPs. Including guard nodes, intermediate and exit. Also, there is an active collection of a list of bridges.

Your bridge must be able to connect to Tor intermediate nodes. Therefore, your vps should not be connected to “ТСПУ” systems. Some local vps providers have direct ASNs without this censorship, but fewer and fewer + this is illegal and they are subject to a large fine for this. Until the situation in the country changes or a global change in the Tor concept occurs (hiding the list of ips of all nodes), bridges will not be able to work

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